Microsoft Adds PDF Rendering In The OneNote API

Last month, OneNote launched the initial version of their API. The first set of features were focused on scenarios for creating pages in OneNote: mobile app scanners, hardware scanners, save-it-for-later for newsreaders, etc. The team listed of the capabilities and features that OneNote is planning to deliver over the next 3 to 6 months. Among them, PDF Rendering was on the top of the list. In the current API, you can create a page with a PDF attachment, but it cannot be rendered onto the page directly. This feature will enable a PDF to be rendered onto the page, making it usable directly on the OneNote page. Since PDF is by far the most popular scan format, this is particularly important to scanner scenarios.

I’m happy to announce that we’re keeping up on our promise to deliver from our backlog as frequently as possible. Just a few weeks after releasing the initial API, we’re making PDF Rendering available to you and your users. As of today, the API can render the pages of a PDF file and place the images on a user’s OneNote page in addition to embedding it. We think this will be helpful for scanner apps, but there are many other possibilities.

We’re leveraging the data-render-src attribute to the <img> tag again, paired with a pdf type MIME part. When you try it you will see that the API accepts page orientation & dimensions from the PDF but you can also specify dimensions for the <img> tag.